Cochrane's hand went slowly to his breast pocket. The corporal eyed him.
"At ease, Corporal!" Cochrane muttered sourly.
Cochrane withdrew the Gestapo shield from his breast pocket. The eyes of the two soldiers went wide with terror.
"Now would you kindly hand me back my passport and get your asses moving through this train!"
Cochrane's other hand remained within his coat, the palm pressed against the handle of the pistol, the forefinger on the trigger. The Luger was Cochrane's only remaining hope if the bluff failed. But the two soldiers were frozen.
“Come on, Sergeant! Get on with it! Or you'll be at a garrison on the Polish border within one week." Only a second more passed.
"Thank you, sir!" blurted the sergeant. He fumbled the passport back into Cochrane's hands. The American snatched it furiously and drove the two soldiers from the compartment with a withering stare. Cochrane thanked a beneficent God that the young sergeant had rattled too easily to obey army protocol-checking the name on the Gestapo shield against the passport. Had either soldier taken that simple measure, all three of them would have died.
NINE
In Zurich, Cochrane scanned streets before he walked them and searched crowded places for faces he might have seen before. He sat in cafes with one arm to the wall and facing the entrances, and he walked only on sidewalks that could take him down one-way streets against the traffic.
When he was certain that the Gestapo was not on his back, he looked for an address that he had memorized months previously in Washington: a print shop in a prosperous residential neighborhood five minutes' walk from the lake. From the flowers and public gardens still in bloom at lakeside, a man might never suspect that all hell was breaking loose in every neighboring nation. But Cochrane knew that Gestapo agents made regular forays into Switzerland, primarily to snoop on German Jews with foreign bank accounts. Cochrane's sense of being followed had been honed to a gleaming edge over the last weeks. He never ceased to wonder when he would unexpectedly see the same face twice.
It was almost the Eleventh Commandment: In this line of work, there is no such thing as coincidence. He knew somewhere they were behind him.
The print shop was on a side street, nestled between an antique dealer and a dressmaker. The proprietor, according to the window, was a man named Engle. Cochrane entered and found a diminutive man with white hair, wire glasses, and a sallow complexion. The man, he learned upon initial inquiry in German, was Herr Engle. Conveniently, the shop was empty. So Cochrane switched to English.
"I have some friends who wish to travel abroad," Cochrane said, slipping into a prearranged patter.
"But, Mein Herr," Engle replied with a sorrowful smile, "I do not handle travelers. I am an engraver."
"I must be mistaken then." Cochrane smiled, knowing he was not mistaken at all. "My Uncle Edgar tells me he has an account here."
Engle's eyes drifted to the window at the front of the shop. "Your Uncle Edgar is a dear friend of mine," he said softly. "Please have a seat."
Cochrane chose a chair near Engle's desk. Engle went to his door, pulled down the shade, and put a sign in place indicating that he would reopen in an hour.
Then Engle turned. "You are certain you were not followed?"
"Certain," answered Cochrane.
Engle shook his head very slightly. "Today everyone is followed. Not good for a man of my years. Please. You come to the back."
Moments later, Cochrane was in the rear of Engle's shop, the doors closed for greater security. Cochrane needed three passports made urgently and smuggled back into Germany. Engle sighed. Cochrane informed him that Uncle Edgar in Washington would handle the reimbursement.
"These passports," Engle inquired. "Swiss? Canadian? What must they be?"
"Swiss would be excellent."
"I cannot work without photographs."
Cochrane withdrew the portrait of the Mauer family from his inside pocket. With a pair of scissors, he trimmed it into three single photographs. These he handed to Engle. Cochrane next printed the address of Frau Mauer's chocolate shop in Munich.
"The passports," Cochrane continued, "must be sent by private courier from within the Reich and in an envelope that will appear to be a business correspondence. It should be marked 'Personal Attention of Frau Mauer.' And I should stress," Cochrane concluded, "that there may be a certain urgency to this order."
Engle raised his eyes slightly. "These days, Mein Herr," he said, "there is always great urgency. The world rushes headlong with great urgency. And toward what end?" The old man hunched his shoulders. He sighed. "We will do what we can do," he said philosophically.
"Nothing more." Engle cocked his white head. "You are in trouble with the Nazis?"
"A bit."
"Gestapo?" asked the old man.
"I’m certain of it."
Engle studied his visitor. "Did you kill one? A Gestapo agent?"
"Probably more than one."
Engle arched an eyebrow. For the first time a crafty smile danced across the merchant's face. "I see," he said. "I suppose then, we must give your order top priority."
"I'd appreciate it."
Engle steepled his fingers, then drummed them slightly against each other. "Be very careful, my American friend," he said. "Zurich is alive with Gestapo and SS. Just in the last day or so there has been a marked increase. Normally there is the usual activity. A German expatriate is found dead here, a wealthy Jew disappears there. But right now they seem to be looking for someone." Engle's gaze alighted on Cochrane. "Maybe an American."
"I've spent the last two days covering my back. They haven't found me."
"May an old man give a young man some advice?"
"Feel free," Cochrane said as Engle's eyes glimmered.
"Continue home immediately," said Engle. "Take the circuitous, least predictable route. I will see that your three friends"-and here the old man glanced down to what Cochrane had written-"the Mauer family, is taken care of."
"Thank you, Herr Engle."
Bill Cochrane offered Engle his hand, which turned into a clasp with both of the engraver's hands. "Filthy bloody Nazis," the old man murmured. "Animals."
*
Cochrane boarded an express for Geneva that afternoon. It was five-thirty when the train pulled away from the station. In the dining car that night, Cochrane's attention focused on an auburn-haired woman of maybe forty dining alone. He took her to be Swiss, and twice when she looked up she saw him watching her, but against his instincts, he decided that amorous pursuits were not worth the trouble. Not this night. So he suffered through the agonizingly bumpy eight hours alone in his sleeping berth, agitated rather than soothed by the churning of the train, and haunted by every footfall in the corridor. He awoke the next morning to notice that the woman had passed the journey just a few berths from him, accompanied indiscreetly by a man who, as Cochrane learned from a casual inspection of the contents of the man's baggage, was a married sales representative for the Renault Corporation, European Division.
In Geneva, Cochrane took the first plane out, which went to Tehran, where the Gestapo crawled in alarming numbers and where he again changed passports, becoming Canadian and using an English-language bookstore as a dead drop for his new identity. He dyed his hair black, acquired glasses, and found an ill-fitting brown suit in a flea market.
Then he grew a moustache, stuffed himself with figs, dates, and rice, and gained eight pounds in one week, puffing out his cheeks. Then he returned to the airport.
He flew to Palestine and enlisted as a cook's assistant on a British freighter bound to Bermuda. The trip was laborious, encountering the fickle mid-Atlantic weather of the late fall, and the temperatures in the galley reminded him of Calcutta or, worse, Savannah or even Washington in midsummer. But the vessel arrived safely.